Hypatia Symposium – Feminists Encountering Animals

Feminists Encountering Animals

In Hypatia 27.3, a special issue on “Animal Others”, leading feminist animal studies scholars, Lori Gruen (author of Ethics and Animals: An Introduction) and Kari Weil (author of Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now) present exciting new work on the intersections of sex, race, gender, and species. As co-editors of the special issue, Gruen and Weil invited six scholars to reflect on some of the lively debates occurring within this burgeoning new field of scholarship. Join the discussion from July 9-13, 2012.

Ambivalence toward Animals and the Moral Community
by KELLY OLIVERW. Alton Jones Chair of Philosophy with appointments in African-American and Diaspora Studies, Film Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies, Vanderbilt University9th July 2012, 11:00am EST

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3 thoughts on “Hypatia Symposium – Feminists Encountering Animals”

This is an exciting time in animal studies as more and more scholars are interested in questions about animals and a growing number of people in general are paying attention to our relationships with other animals. Like other types of scholarship that got its start from activists theorizing about how to change the world, I think it is important to make explicit the contributions that feminists bring to the discussion.

As Kari and I wrote in our contribution to Margo DeMello’s book *Teaching the Animal*:
“It may even seem that there is a “natural” fit between women/gender studies and animal studies, not because women are naturally connected to or drawn to animals, as much of patriarchal thinking would have it, but rather because of the ways that sexism and speciesism mutually inform one another. Like sexism and racism, speciesism, is the prejudicial view that there is an ontologically distinct marker, in this case species membership, that adds value to those who belong to the human species and justifies domination of those who don’t. As scholars who interrogate the constructions of categories of gender, species, and race and analyze the connections — perceived and real — among women, animals, and nature, we believe bringing animal studies and women’s studies together is beneficial to both fields of inquiry.”